Recent advances on Electrically Conductive Adhesives

As one of the promising lead-free interconnection materials, electrically conductive adhesive (ECA) has made considerable advances in recent years. Compared to metal solder, ECAs offer numerous advantages, such as environmental friendliness (elimination of lead usage and flux cleaning), mild processing conditions, fewer processing steps (reducing processing cost), low stress on the substrates and fine pitch capability. However, ECAs have some challenging issues, such as lower electrical and thermal conductivities compared to solder joints, conductivity fatigue in reliability tests, limited current carrying capability, poor impact performance, etc. To meet specific applications required for emerging electronic packaging technologies, worldwide research efforts have been devoted to improving the performance of ECAs, such as electrical and mechanical properties and the reliability under various conditions. Here, we summarize recent advances in isotropically conductive adhesive (ICA) technology. We mainly discuss how the electrical and reliability properties of ICAs can be engineered for electronic packaging applications.